Kite Party Interview

At the end of May, my band Churchkey played a show with Kite Party when they came through Chicago during their tour with Three Man Cannon. A few days later, I sent the band some interview questions. Russell tells me about how their tour went, their new record “Come on Wandering”, the story behind its album artwork, and more.

Hey, thanks for doing this! Can you start off by introducing yourself and what you do in Kite Party?

I’m Russell, and I play guitar and sing.

How’s it been since the show in Chicago? Did the rest of the tour go pretty well?

The rest of the tour was great, it was one of those tours that felt like it was only three days long.

Any major highlights from the road? I’m sure it’s been a lot of fun having Three Man Cannon around.

Yeah I think being with them was definitely the major highlight of the trip. We have toured with them over the years, and Three Man Cannon actually played our very first show back in 2008. For this tour though, they seemed to be in a completely different mindset, literally every single night they killed it. It was really amazing to be able to witness the facemelting that was going on.

Your new record Come on Wandering was just recently released. How has the response been to that?

The response has been pretty positive. We had a lot of support with this record from our label, Animal Style, and our friend Eric Osman. Also my dad seemed to like the record. I follow him on Spotify and he listened to it twice in a row the day it came out, hah.

In terms of the lyrics, what are the main themes on Come on Wandering?

Mostly womb-separation anxiety. If that’s not an official thing, it should be. I mean there’s truth to that, really. We were feeling very weird about not being in a comfort zone anymore, sort of coming out from under the cover of youth and having to deal with everything. I am kind of obsessed with youth, and what it means to be young, and how long you can hang on to it.

I really enjoy the album artwork too, could you describe what your initial ideas with that were?

Thanks! Initially we wanted to get an illustrator to just do some freely associated sketches. We were going to find someone and be like “the record is called ‘Come on Wandering’, have at it.” But in the end I knew I would probably be too controlling to really do it, so I tried to make some drawings that looked loose and a little ambiguous, and in the end I think it pretty much matches up with a lot of the feeling of the music. Matt from Animal Style also got the vinyl sleeves printed on the inside of the cardstock rather than the coated side, so they have a flat matte finish. He said that’s how Pedro The Lion’s Control was printed. I was really excited about that because I was definitely referencing the looseness and collage stuff that is on that record cover.

How has the band’s songwriting and recording process changed since your previous record, Baseball Season came out in 2011?

Our songwriting process got a lot less simple, I guess. We used to always write collectively, and together, but with this one we would come to practice with ideas already and try to work with them. That seems easy, but for us it was really weird because no one wanted to derail the song from whoever first thought of the basic idea. For Baseball Season, we pretty much just put our heads together and exported whatever we came up with, but for this there was a lot more shaping and thinking and maybe a little too much analyzing, hah.